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News & Analysis | REG•WATCH Blog | Press Room
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Latest Watcher: What Spinach Tells Us About Food Safety
In the latest issue of the Watcher, we take a look at the lessons learned from the recent E.Coli outbreak. FDA has confirmed 183 cases as of yesterday with 29 cases of kidney failure.
The FDA is close to narrowing in on the source of contamination, but as the New York Times points out, finding the spinach packaging plant may not get to the heart of the problem. Not only are there gaps in inspection and oversight, as we noted in the Watcher, but practices in the cattle industry may be contributing to E.Coli contamination in ground water. According to the article, the practice of feeding cattle grain, instead of grass, increases the risk of the particularly dangerous strain of E.Coli seen in the recent outbreak. If manure contaminated with this E.Coli ends up in the water supply, it can then contaminate other food that we eat.
The United States Department of Agriculture does recognize the threat from these huge lagoons of waste, and so pays 75 percent of the cost for a confinement cattle farmer to make manure pits watertight, either by lining them with concrete or building them above ground. But taxpayers are financing a policy that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop feeding grain to cattle.
California’s spinach industry is now the financial victim of an outbreak it probably did not cause, and meanwhile, thousands of acres of other produce are still downstream from these lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure. So give the spinach growers a break, and direct your attention to the people in our agricultural community who just might be able to solve this deadly problem: the beef and dairy farmers.
Of course, animal farm runoff is just one part of the food safety puzzle, providing more evidence that more must be done to protect the nation's food supply.
Posted by Genevieve Smith
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